Dr. Fill is the creation of Matt Ginsberg, an artificial intelligence scientist and cruciverbalist, what you should fill in if you're ever starting at the clue: "a creator of crossword puzzles." The Eugene, Ore., software developer has constructed several dozen puzzles that ran in the New York Times.

He set off on the project a little more than a year ago, in part because he felt Watson left the public with a false impression about the nature of artificial intelligence.

Latest News Video

Ginsberg said the popular narrative became that machines are learning to outthink humans, a story line that leads pessimistic imaginations to the Terminator movies. He thought it was a lost opportunity to make a important point.

It goes like this: Computers don't think. They're not sentient, nor are they on the verge of becoming so. But they're really, really good at processing lots of information very quickly. That, plus improving artificial intelligence, lets us harness computers to solve increasingly complex problems. They're not about to take over, but they can take more mundane work off our plates.

"They just solve problems differently, and that's great, because we need help," he said. "I hate balancing my checkbook, and my computer loves it, as far as I can tell."

Programs that play Jeopardy or solve crosswords represent a step forward in artificial intelligence, said Peter Norvig, who teaches at Stanford and works on machine learning initiatives as director of research at Google.

"We're not crossing the barrier from non-thinking to thinking machines, but it provides another example of computers dealing with uncertainty; dealing with a messy world rather than a neat world," he said.

The modern approach to artificial intelligence is mostly a matter of pattern recognition and probability. Feed the software algorithm enough documents, and things like the arrangement of sentences and proximity of words begin to provide a statistical basis for evaluating the likelihood of an answer to any given query.

The crossing words fill in letters for other clues, helping limit possibilities for any particular answer. And crossword creators love to use wordplay and trickery, which can throw off the orderly world of statistics.

Ginsberg is confident he's found some novel approaches for getting machines to deal with these challenges. One common technique in artificial intelligence is to first answer the problem with the most constraints, which in the case of crossword puzzles would mean clues with the least possible answers.

But this ends up being a bad strategy because an obvious answer might be obvious because a puzzle creator is trying to trip up the player. That would lead the computer down a series of false paths on additional clues, generating more wrong answers.

Ginsberg programmed Dr. Fill to hold off on the seemingly easy ones and explore the possibilities for the spaces around it first, until the level of certainty for that original clue reaches a higher level of probability.

Dr. Fill draws its answers from a database including every clue that's appeared in a major crossword since 1990. Also included: some search frequency data from Google and snippets from movie site IMDb.com. Like Watson, the database includes Wikipedia.

There are big differences from Watson. A team of IBM researchers spent years and millions of dollars building the supercomputer, which can process 80 trillion operations per second. Ginsberg developed Dr. Fill himself. The system, including the database, fits on a MacBook Pro.

Asked how Dr. Fill is likely to fare in the tournament, which begins March 16, Ginsberg is prudent. There are obstacles that would "totally crush it," which he's not advertising. But he's run Dr. Fill through simulations of 17 previous tournaments, and it came out on top several times.